Doeth said:
Those aren't based on geographigal borders, they are based on population...
I think it should be based on tribal boundries, not geography
-- the problem with that is that Africa then would have hundreds upon hundreds of separate sovereignties.
The Scramble didn't "Balkanize" Africa; it consolidated it. The number of separate political units went down drastically -- to well under a tenth of the precolonial total.
Some ethnic groups were split up; the Maasai, for instance. But many others (for example, the Kikuyu) were enclosed within new units much larger than their previous ones.
If things had gone a little differently, South Africa would have turned out much larger than it did.
Eg., the High Commission territories very nearly got included, as did Southern Rhodesia. SW Africa/Namibia went to Germany (and eventual separate status) by default.
Push the discovery of the Rand goldfields back from 1886 to 1877-78, so that the Disraelian push for a South African confederation worked instead of failing (and hence no Majuba or Boer War), and you'd probably end up with a South Africa that stretched all the way to the southern Congo.
Possibly with Cecil Rhodes as a great expansionist Prime Minister in the 1880's and 1890's.